This will, I hope, be outside of the area of “Those Feels”. I do this partly so that, if I ever do get “Better”, I can be sure to never make light of how bad it could get with rose-tinted hindsight. But also, I avoid writing “feely” posts because they tend to be very fleeting, and this particular topic is something that does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

I’ve made a lot of progress in the past 2 years. Those close to me and my therapist would say as much. But if you grabbed me on any day of the week, nearly any time of the day, I’d say I’m just kind of waiting around. At this point, depression for the rest of my life is a matter of degree, and I accept I’ll always have it, but I don’t expect to get better. Yeah, I’ve gotten “better”, but I’m not going to get “Better” with a capital “B”. To be functional or “normal”, where mental illness is a person’s attribute instead of a definition.

Let’s skip the part where I pretend to know all about Dialectical Behavior Therapy and just get to the part that my therapist has given me.

Hopelessness is a very strong thought for me; it’s taken years for me to try to even acknowledge that maybe things realistically have a chance of changing. Having this small degree of freedom has allowed me to see just how incredibly devoted my thoughts have been to this hopelessness, to this immobility, to this futility. It has been more than a belief, it has been as foundational as “I think, therefore I am”.

It’s almost as strong, one could say, as a belief in god. The belief that people hold so concretely that they know it to be true, without question. It is the belief that is at the center of all others for them. They’ll do any number of mental acrobatics to keep it in place, and anything that may cause them to question the belief questions their very self.

Several years ago, after I actually started taking steps to treat my depression, I slowly came to the realization that part of me was resisting the change. Yes, a part of it was the bravery required in trying new things during the process of recovery. And yes, a very large portion of it was hopelessness for the future. But as time went on and both of those things began to wane, I still felt some reluctance. Some fear of getting better. It’s taken me quite some time to try to make any sense of it at all because it quickly becomes a recursive loop of fear.

In a small way, it feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome, or at least vaguely resembles it. Depression and self-loathing almost killed me, but in a very strange way, they also saved me. Because of them, I left a situation that I found unbearable, but what made the situation unbearable was the depression and self-loathing that it created. In a strange sense, depression and self-loathing saved me from more intense depression and self-loathing. The result is this odd affection I have for depression (and self-loathing to a lesser extent) because it’s reliable and I know what to expect, even if what I expect is horrible. Leaving would mean new pains, new experiences that are unfamiliar and thus freshly terrifying.

But there was also something else. Something much more tangible that made me uncomfortable just to try to think of my life without depression. It was as though I actually felt that something of value would be lost.

A while ago I wrote a post about what I call (‘the Stranger’)[/blog/2015/10/stranger-danger]. This constant nagging of “What would someone think if a random stranger walked in right now?”. That there’s this indefinable hypothetical person who is always ready to judge, who’s just off-stage ready to pounce.

Recently I’ve noticed that I think it extends far beyond that. I realized that, when I’m in a situation where I feel fear of what someone may think of me, it feels the same for every person (with a few exceptions). The feeling that I’m going to be judged as unpunctual from my dad feels the same as the feeling of being judged as unpunctual by a doctor’s secretary. I don’t feel “Oh no Lucy will think X of me”, it’s just “someone will feel X of me”.

What I think I’ve realized is that it feels the same because it is the same. It feels like all people are the same person. Like every person who can potentially judge me (i.e. everyone) is part of a hive mind. Like Agent Smith in The Matrix. Like I’m in a video game and everyone is an NPC, and it’s really the Game that I’m interacting with, who is judging me. Or like they’re all being possessed by the same entity.

Life is complex. I’ll definitely admit that. There are a million different ways to explain and define the causes and effects of a situation and it’s seldom that one can say with one hundred percent certainty, especially when there is human behavior involved. But I kind of have a theory about how my current progress, and treatment, is going in terms of health and psychology.

One of the more damning symptoms that have emerged since this whole chronic illness thing kicked off is how horribly my memory has been effected. For a while it was so bad that it felt like I could hardly function; you’d ask me a question and I’d just sit there in silence, not because of an “on the tip of my tongue” feeling but because I my brain wasn’t giving me the words for the thought I wanted to express. It feels like trying to use the web when the internet is down. The wheel just keeps spinning but the page never loads.

It always reminds me of the movie Memento where the lead character can no longer form long-term memories and thus has to “remember” things by taking polaroid photographs. I’m not quite that bad, but ever since the chronic illness really started getting serious, I’ve quite literally felt like I can’t remember past a certain point in the past. It felt like my brain suddenly gated them off and wouldn’t pull up anything; childhood memories, events, dates, and most importantly, myself.

I have a constant temptation with this blog to post things that I see online that I can relate to. There’s no shortage of them, especially on Tumblr; graphics and images of things that make me go “this expresses how I feel perfectly!”

They can be both negative and positive. There are images of encouragement of how things could be (many of which I find to be shallow and cliche), but there are also the depressing ones that describe how things are now. For some reason the negative ones feel better, I guess because it’s more cathartic, and I won’t deny to having a folder of them saved to my PC. But even though I have nights were I seek the comfort of seeing such images, I don’t think they’re actually helpful, and that’s what I want this blog to be.

“Socially awkward” makes my mind jump to saying something at an inappropriate time, or speaking or laughing too loudly, or being unaware of personal space boundaries. While I constantly worry about being seen (or exposed) as that person, the majority of me being “socially awkward” mostly comes from the exact opposite.

For a very long time, I would say nothing in social situations even when being directly addressed. My brain just didn’t come up with what the response should be, even if the situation called for a simple “Thanks”. After a lot of practice (with cashiers, mostly), I taught myself to respond with a list of phrases for situations, like those little kids books that plays a sound when you press a button when the story tells you to.

Something that I’ve been doing recently is trying to meditate every day. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since I’d seen Sam Harris mention it as a kind of “secular spirituality” (my words). From what I’ve learned and experienced so far, it is a good compliment to everything else I’ve been practicing to address chronic and mental illness (somatic experiencing/trauma/whatever you want to call it).

I use an app called Insight Timer that has guided meditations. The ones I try to find are not so much what I’d (perhaps harshly) consider “woo woo” (e.g. ‘feeling the energy of the earth’) but instead are more about connecting with the present moment. (My favorites: Joseph Goldstein, Tara Branch, The Easier Softer Way Meditation, and Jason Murphy Pedulla.)

That’s how I’d define mindfulness: connecting with the present moment in one’s body. Because I’m almost constantly thinking -which is fine because that’s how the brain work- I’m always outside of the present moment in our body. I’m thinking about the past or the future, or I’m judging something about the present. All of this is taking my attention away from the present moment -not “this period of 10 minutes for meditation”, the exact present moment in which my body is having sensations and emotions come and go, ebb and flow. Thought is fine; it’s part of what makes life so interesting and I’d scarcely get anything done without it. But our brains can do more than just thinking and as with most things, there’s a balance to be had.